Our fifth gig as a four piece, and our third venturing beyond our spiritual and (kind of) actual home of The Folklore Rooms.
The Court is a monthly celebration of folklore, produced by the marvellous Hattie Snooks and JD Henshaw. This was an imbolc special, for which we were treated to tales of the Celtic Goddess Brigid, and a wonderful talk from academic and writer Rachel Poulton, taking in the psychogeography and hauntology of nearby Chanctonbury Ring.
Hattie, who is writing a new song for each Court this year under her alter-ego Queen Mab, describes her night as a living zine, and pleasingly Poulton had actual zines to sell [1], completing the perfect circle in my mind.
The Highchurches were on last, after the interval. Our fiddle player arrived off the back of an extremely stressful week but still played beautifully; I made a few mistakes, but sang well, and enjoyed Martha’s extremely funny betwixt-song jokes and tales.
It was my favourite gig of ours, in fact. We really felt like a proper band, and the audience enjoyed it so much they demanded an encore – an entirely new and by no means unwelcome experience.
“Joy in the Morning?” I suggested to the rest of the band, aka the only song from our regular performing back catalogue that we hadn’t played.
“I’ll just get the lyrics”, said Martha, who disappeared backstage, her form a shadow on the backdrop picture of a heavy metal ukulele.
I sat down for this last tune, of an entirely acoustic set, and just tried to take it all in. The confidence of the performance was amazing to experience from my seated, quasi-audience position, and I can’t wait to rehearse new songs with these lads over the coming weeks and months.
We’re not performing much until May, with our only scheduled gig at the next This Machine Kills Wasps at (you guessed it) The Folklore Rooms on Friday 21st March.
This is to allow Martha to focus on preparing for her debut hour-long show at the Brighton Fringe. But so far this hiatus has been good for the band: it’s given us time to write, practice, and rehearse new songs, without the pressure of an impending gig. This has been extremely lovely, and hopefully we’ll have a chance to record some of our songs properly in the new year.
Some of them will certainly enter our set list, in any case.
For this gig, we played:
- Avalon (featuring new backing harmonies, written by Martha)
- Even Keel (never sounded more beautiful, even though one of us – fine, me – accidentally started playing Doris Wu instead, to begin with)
- Doris Wu
- Hymn For The Ruins
- Harvest Moon
- Joy in the Morning (encore).
It was a fabulous gig, with a wonderfully receptive audience and a few familiar faces from the Hurstpierpoint Wassail a few weeks back.
I’d recommend Hattie’s night to anyone living in Brighton, even when we aren’t performing at it, which I’d happily do every month if she’d let us.
I guess she might want to book other bands sometimes too, though. Maybe.
[1] Of course I bought one. More on that in a future post.
jamesofwalsh 